Poll: 3 years in, majority don't understand PPACA

By Heather Stauffer,
March 22, 2013 at 11:00 AM
- Last modified: March 22, 2013 at 11:31 AM

Tomorrow marks three years since President Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act into law, and a new poll says a majority of Americans don't understand how it will affect them.

According to the March poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation, 57 percent of Americans say they don't have enough information about the PPACA to understand how it will affect them. Among the uninsured, that figure rises to 67 percent.

On the question of Medicaid expansion, 78 percent of Americans said they had not heard enough to say whether their state's governor had announced a decision. Forty-eight percent say they have heard nothing at all about their state's decision on whether to run its own health insurance marketplace, and 29 percent said they had heard only a little.

The poll said 58 percent of adults think the rate of growth of national health expenditures has increased faster than normal in recent years, although it has actually slowed "markedly," in Kaiser's words.

Sixty-two percent of respondents say they have had no direct experience with the law so far.

Public opinion on the law remains divided, largely on party lines, with 37 percent viewing it favorably, 40 percent viewing it unfavorably and 23 percent declining to offer an opinion.

As in previous polls, Kaiser said, the law's most popular provisions are among the least widely recognized, and vice versa, and many Americans hold misimpressions about the law's contents.